Interior Design

Although I studied with Minor White in an experimental graduate program in photography at MIT and admired his iconic photographic abstractions, for most of my career my chief interest has been in portraiture as a personal documentary and street photographer.

I never felt personally connected to abstraction until ten years ago when, at a golf equipment trade show, I saw a bisected golf ball. For the first time, abstraction resonated with me as I discovered elegant formal qualities and surprising metaphorical possibilities in the unlikeliest of places, a 1.68” golf ball. Thirty-five years after first viewing the abstractions of photographers White and Aaron Siskind and the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, I learned to appreciate and embrace abstraction in my own work. For some viewers, my photographs from this series, titled “Interior Design,” allude to celestial bodies and the sublime. For me, their serendipitous structural exquisiteness and their subtle and passionate arrays of colors are gifts.

Initially, the balls were cut precisely with a saw blade. But more recently, I have sculpted the interior surfaces with cutting and marking tools or manipulated them into new and sometimes almost organic shapes before photographing them. Making these discoveries – and seeing the results enlarged up to 36” x 36” – has been riveting.